Should parents work at keeping their teen kids virgin?

Here’s a link to an MPSIMS thread started by Duck Duck Goose, “Oh, Gawd. Need serious advice. Parents of teen girls, gather 'round…”

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=70521&pagenumber=1

(You don’t nee to read the MPSIMS thread to participate in this debate. I included it as it’s what prompted me to start this thread.)

A number of posters offered Mrs. Goose suggestions re her almost 17 daugher, who seems to be tettering on the edge of “going all the way” with her boyfriend. Many suggested seeing to it that the daugher had knowlege of, and access to, contraception. But a few seemed to assume that the proper course of action would be to take whatever steps were necessary to absolutely see to it that the daughter did NOT become sexually active, or that she CEASE & DESIST immediately (if not sooner) if she had already taken this step.

I’m wondering if many parents think keeping their teenagers virgin is an important goal? And would this apply to daughters only, or to sons as well? Also, for those who feel this way, just how long do you want your kids to stay virgin? Until what age? Or do you actually want them to wait for marriage?

One more question for those who feel this way – if you discover that a son or daughter is sexually active, would you try to persuade them, or compel them, to give it up?

We’ve emphasized to our girls that we think it best for them to minimize sexual activity and to delay intercourse until you’re involved with someone with whom you’d want to have a longterm relationship and children with, but we’re no fools, either. My wife and I started dating at age 15, and were circumspect and cautious, but any edicts or ultimatums about our behavior towards each other by our respective parents would not have been heeded. Now, over 27 years later, we get to be the parents! Oh joy!

So we make sure our kids have accurate information about sex and birth control, set limits regarding curfews, drinking (not acceptable), and let them know our expectations of them. And we pray a lot.

I don’t feel that virginity is a unique trait which must be preserved at all costs, but I feel the longer they delay intercourse, the greater their chances for happy adult relationships. Of course, if they delay it past the age of 30, this could cause its own set of problems.

I don’t have sons, so I don’t know how I’d feel about them. This way its easier to just tell my daughters “Boys are evil. I know. I was one.”

I can relate to this topic pretty easily, since I am also 17. I can tell you now that I am not going to be having any sex until I am married, but that is my choice. If I really wanted to have sex, then I would. And believe me, the temptations are there…anyway. I think that, as a parent, if you have any idea that your child will be participating in sexual activities, provide contraception. That is the best thing you can do. Telling her to not ave sex won’t prevent her from having sex, if she wants sex. At least giving her birth control pills and condoms will prevent her from getting pregnant.

I think its just a natural tendency for parents to be concerned about their kids having sex. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with not wanting to see thier kids grow up too fast.

I remember back in high school when I would bring a girl home, my parents would always find some reason to come in the room. Like “Hey, do you kids want samwiches for luch”. My girlfriend would then be like “oh, your mom is so nice” while I’m all like “???..All of a sudden after 16 years, mom decides to make me a sandwich?”.

Anyway, I can’t wait until I have a daughter so I can mess with her boyfriends.

It seems to me that sex before the age of 18 can have pretty serious consequences–both the obvious (pregnancy and diease) and the less tangible–a sexual relationship is more often complicated, it seems to me, than one that isn’t “going all the way”.

So their are potential disadvantages to having sex in high school, and I don’t think the potential advantages outweigh them. I really wouldn’t be shocked or upset if my teenager were going “almost all the way” in their late teens (provided it was with another teen–all this changes if the other person is 30) but I would strongly encourage them to refrain from actual intercourse until they were old enough and in a secure enough relationship that a) pregnancy would be an inconvinience, not a tragedy and b) they were sure they were doing things for their own reasons, that they knoew their own mind.

I can understand and support parents wanting their children to remain virgins until they are ready to have sex and are in a serious, loving relationship where sex would be healthy. I can’t see any problem with that.

Of course, if we’re talkign sleeping around, yes, parents (if they feel it is important) should try to instill in them a moral code that they are comfortable with.

I always think that the double standard idea is interesting; is there really anyone out there who thinks it’s OK for their sons, but not for their daughters, to be sexually active? I, personally, have never known anyone with this idea. I would be equally unhappy with poor choices about early sex from a son or a daughter.

Finally I no longer feel as though I am the only person that happens to.

I’m 16, and seriously, if a teen wants to have sex, there isn’t much you’re going to be able to do to stop them. I’m supposed to leave my bedroom door open when girls are over, and my girlfriend’s mom always makes sure there is adult supervision. But like it does any good. We’ve chosen to do our thing, and truthfully, I wish I had more money for condoms so I could be better prepared when I’m not expecting something to happen.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DeadAngel *
**

Took it right out of my mouth. If two people decide they’re going to do it, that’s it.

Might as well attempt to hold back the tide.

Give 'em the talk anyway to let 'em know you care, give 'em the rubbers, and hope that you have raised them well enough to look after themselves. At this point, they’re on their own.

Eh, I don’t particularly care whether she’s a “virgin” or not–I just want her to be safe.

I want her to not make a baby.

I want her to not have to go through the “abortion/no abortion” decision.

I want her to, My God, not have to carry a baby for nine months and go through labor and delivery at age 17 and then have to decide what to do with a child.

I want her to not feel she has to marry the father of her baby.

I want her to not get AIDS, or chlamydia, or antibiotic-resistant gonorhhea, or herpes, or genital warts.

I want her to not be known around school as the Town Pump.

Ten years from now, I want her to not have to look back and bitterly wish she hadn’t behaved in a certain way.

I want her to like herself.

Is that asking a lot?

But most of all, I want her to not have her heart broken by some skanky, horny teenager whom she loves deeply but who proves to be only interested in her as long as she “puts out”.

DDG that’s totally what I meant. The issue isn’t sex, it’s how it’s carried about. My mom isn’t heartbroken that my boyfriend and I are sleeping together because we take the proper precautions, we’re in a serious long-term relationship and we’re monogamous.

I wuld be most worried about exactly what you are, which is that she’d have sex and regret it, or not even really want to at the time. This has happened to a few of my friends, and it isn’t healthy.

My parents never really gave about whether I was having sex. (Well, that’s not quite true… there were a few instances when guy friends were over at my house, but I digress.) The main thing they did was make sure I knew about safer sex (I did, and had for several years).

Other than that, they believed I was intelligent enough to make smart decisions. It was quite civilized, I felt.

Honestly, someone always says thius whenever this topic comes up and I think it is a red herring. The discussion is not whether or not you should (or can) allow a 16 year old to have sex once they have decided to. The issue is what you teach them for the whole 16 years leading up to that will influence their decision? This varies alot: I have known people who taught thier children that the right thing to do was to start having sex around 15 or 16, people who taught their children that the right thing to doo was to start having sex around 19 or 20, people who taught thier children to wait until they were engaged, taught thier children to wait until they were married.

Even if a parent has no influence on a teen who has decided to have sex, a parent has some (though not as much as they would like) influence over whether or not that teen will decide to have sex. How a parent ought to excerice that influence is the discussion here. As I said before, I would try to teach my children that the potential harms done does not equal the potential benefits when one is a teen.

Hazel wrote:

Well, of course. You can get a higher bride price for a virgin daughter when you sell her into marriage. :rolleyes:

I don’t know how much influence parents have on their children when it comes to sex. When I decided to sleep with my fiance for the first time, what my parents thought was really the last thing on my mind. And they have always, always taught me that sex should be saved for marriage. My mom even told me once that sex isn’t fun or worth it (Which leads me to believe she doesn’t know what she’s doing). But because I knew she would disapprove, I never asked her to take me to the OB/GYN for contraception information, or to be on The Pill. Because she made sex to be OFF LIMITS, I avoided talking to her about it at all.
I really believe that if she had took a different approach, I would have been more comfortable sharing, asking for advice, etc etc. For example instead of “Sex is bad! No sex until you are married!” she said, “Sex comes with responsiblity. When you think you want to start having sex, think about all this (lists everything previously mentioned in thread by DDG) and then we can go to the OB/GYN to get you on The Pill.”

Another thing, there is a lot of power in knowing that you can have sex safely, and choosing not to, rather than having no what safe sex is, and choosing to just do it anyway.

If I ever had kids, I would consider convincing them to abstain from any sexual activity until marriage to be one of my most important responsibilites. As far as conctraception was concerned I would not encourage it because I think they need to understand that all decisions have consequences and I see contraception as an attempt to sidestep a few of the negative consequences of sexual intercourse and no one who is not prepared to deal with those consequences should be engaging in sexual activity.

I didn’t respond to DDG’s thread because I felt I could add nothing to the good advice she’d already received.

However, this conversation has often come up in chat and I’m somewhat stunned by how many parents to their children becoming (or even looking like becoming) sexually active.

My daughter is sexually active, and at a far younger age than I would have preferred (she’s not yet 15), but still my issues surrounding that have nothing to do with her living up to some ideal, but rather centre around her physical and emotional welfare.

I guess I see the ideal of “saving oneself” for marriage as a goal that only the individual themselves has the right to set, not one which can or should be imposed from outside. It saddens me that so many teenagers have been made to feel that they have in some way let their parents down when their parents have discovered their sexual activity.

Should we do everything practical to ensure that our children are not pressured into sexual activity before they are ready? Of course we should. Do we have the right to let our children know our personal values regarding sex? Of course we do. We also have the responsibility to ensure our children are aware of the potential physical and emotional consequences of sex and have access to whatever resources they need in order to make informed choices.

What we don’t have the right to do is demand that their values be the same as our own, and punish them when they fall short of our ideals. Our children are thinking, feeling individuals, and our job is to guide them into making the best choices for themselves, not impose the choices we would have made on them.

If you don’t believe that rejecting your children for failing to live up to arbitrary moral standards is both hurtful and damaging to them, feel free to pop into chat some time and talk to the teenagers in the channel.

Teenagers are considering and having sex at ages we baby boomers and generation Xers might think of as “too young”. And simply telling them not to isn’t going to change that reality. If we want them to abstain we need to give them some damn good reasons to do so, and it seems to me that a lot of times we fall very short of reasoned, logical answers when they ask us “why” or “why not”. We fail to come up with reasons which make sense to them.

One thing alluded to in the other thread which I found disturbing was the assumption that teenage males are predatory and detached emotionally from the sex they are having. While that may have been largely true of the teenage males of my generation, and may even be substantially true of teenage males today, an large number of the young males I talk to are very emotionally involved in their sexual relationships, and are just as vulnerable to being hurt as their female counterparts.

In summary, I don’t see virginity or the loss of it as a big deal, I see teaching our children to make informed choices and take responsibility for those choices as the objective.

Virginity’s not so much the issue; it’s really the emotional detriment I’d want to shield my child from–other than pregnancy, but there’s at least contraceptives for that.

Sex at an age younger than 16 generally cannot have much emotion attached to it, being that before that age (or the maturity level of that age, which sometimes is not reached until much later) one does not really know one’s own identity, and not knowing oneself, you have no idea what’s right for you in a partner. Having sex with someone with whom you have little or no real emotional connection is sex for the sake of sex, and if your first year or two of sexual experience is nothing but sex for the sake of sex, you see sex as something purely physical and I think that can seriously damage one’s ability to have a healthy emotional relationship.

In my friends and acquaintances, I have noticed a definite correlation between age at which they became sexually active and the depth of their relationships now–the ones who started younger are without exception able to have shallow and short-term relationships at best, if even anything you would call a relationship, and those who started around 17 or 18 are involved in or have at some point been involved in deep, genuine, long-term relationships.

When the first sexual relationships you have are with people you don’t care about or don’t care about you, you continue that pattern because it’s all you know, and the same is true for those whose first sexual relationships involve love and trust. Most people I know whose first time was with someone they loved are not even turned on by the idea of sex with a random person.

I would therefore encourage my child to wait until they had reached a level of understanding of themselves as well as of their partner, just for the fact that if they don’t, they will probably never experience sex as it should be experienced, and their relationships will suffer for it. It could be argued that I am displacing my own values of “how sex should be experienced” upon my future kids, and who I am I to decide that for anyone, but since I’ve yet to see anyone successfully intermix shallow sex and a healthy, non-emotionally-destructive relationship, I’ll stick to my guns.

Parents working at keeping their kids virginal?

HA-HA-HA-HA WOOOO-HOOOO!

Sorry. Had to wipe my eyes there. Good luck. When I reached puberty my prick awoke fully and led me around through school. The hormones raged! A breeze could give me and most other guys an erection and self satisfaction gets durn boring real quick!

In the 50s, it was good guys and good girls don’t, and promptly produced a sexually screwed up generation that made room for the lusty 60’s. Every time any society has tried to control sexual activity before marriage, problems develop and a double standard develops, prostitution illegally flourishes and unhappy marriages develop out of sexual ignorance. In the 50s also it was accepted for guys to go find ‘bad girls’ and have fun, then marry a virginal ‘good girl’ who had little concept of sex, had been told that it was Bad, Dirty and Sinful as well as Dangerous and were expected to act like a lusty whore on her wedding night!!

They couldn’t make the change! Many, many a marriage existed only because it was the thing to do while they had a one sided sex life. He was happy, but she was not, in bed. She did her ‘wifey duties’.

Better to caution the kids, let the schools teach about real sex instead of the assorted, biased and heavily censored crap they teach now, teach them about disease, protection, birth control, emotions, infatuation and that just because you think you love the guy and biology is telling you to pop a kid Does Not Mean That You Should, before marriage because it aint gonna make him stay with you.

Make sure they fell comfortable with asking you sex questions and questions concerning their hot feelings about having sex. Sex, in a teen, is a forceful urge strong enough to move a mountain.

If you brainwash your kid and brow beat him or her into being chaste, they will pay for it years down the road by being Screwed Up!!

It’s happened before. Many times.